The Pendragon's Challenge (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 7) (11 page)

Cade carried the mantle and his sword, Caledfwlch, on his person. Dafydd wore the sword, Dyrnwyn, belted at his waist. And Hywel kept the knife among his possessions. Since it was his family who’d protected it all these years, it seemed appropriate for him to be the one to decide when to use it. Not that it was any use against the Northumbrians, since it’s purpose was to feed the multitude, as Christ had done, and the moment the blade had pierced Jesus’s side, it became useless as a weapon. Taliesin had borrowed it during his recent journey and used it often.

At one time, Rhiann might have had the chess piece on her, since Mabon had given it to her, but she said it repulsed her, and thus had entrusted it to Taliesin.

Cade shook his head. “I will say this only once more: I am leaving, and I’m taking my people with me. This is a fool’s fight, and one you can’t win. If you choose to lose your life over a Treasure, that is your decision—and your delusion—not mine.” He spun on his heel and headed back down the hall, the others following in his wake.

He had just put out a hand to open the doors, because the two men who guarded them weren’t moving, when Penda called, “Wait!”

Cade stopped and looked back.

Penda was loping towards him. “All right, all right. You win. We will all go.”

But then a bell tolled above their heads. Hearing it, Cade pushed open the doors, and everyone who’d been in the hall spilled into the courtyard. Cade crossed it to reach the main gateway to the street.

As he stepped out from the colonnade, Peada reined in amidst a small company of men. “They come! They come!”

“How many and how far?” Penda moved to hold the bridle of his son’s horse.

“You can see their banners.” Peada pointed north and then swung his arm to indicate the east as well. “Another quarter of an hour and they’ll surround us completely.”

Cade cursed and turned on Penda. “You and your pride will be the death of us all.”

Penda firmed his chin. “I always meant to stand and fight.”

“Are your men ready? Have you prepared oil and fire? Where are your archers?”

“I have them,” Penda said defensively. “They’re on the walls.”

Cade narrowed his eyes as he looked at the Mercian king. To become an expert archer took long practice from childhood, and while all Welshmen high and low were so trained, most Saxons never valued archery enough to put in that kind of effort. If Penda was telling the truth, he deserved some credit for planning ahead. “We cannot win with the numbers we have now. You do realize this?”

“I am prepared to die for Mercia.”

“Well, I am not.” Cade spat out the last word.

“From what we saw earlier, they’re predominantly on foot, my lord,” Hywel said in Welsh in an undertone. “We should make use of the little time we do have.”

Cade turned to Dafydd. “Take Angharad, all our horses, and whatever of Penda’s strays who will go with you, and go now through the southern gate across the Dee to Caer Gwrlie. It is defensible, and your arm will keep it so.”

“My lord, no! I will stand and fight with you!”

“If we wait any longer, it will be too late. It’s already too late for the bulk of Penda’s men.” Cade gestured to Dafydd’s sword. “That is enough to defend your retreat all by itself.”

“What about you? How will you escape without horses?” Angharad said.

“We’ll take the western tunnel,” Cade said.

Dafydd subsided, nodding, but when Cade turned back to Penda, his brow was furrowed with puzzlement. “What tunnel?”

Cade studied his uncle, surprised that he didn’t know. “The Romans built tunnels under every city and house in Wales—maybe throughout the whole empire. The tunnel from Chester runs from just inside the western wall under the river and to the watchtower on the other side.”

“What watchtower?” Penda spread his hands wide. “We know of no such tunnel.”

Bedwyr scoffed. “That would be because you were not born a Briton.” He turned to Cade. “My grandfather was a man of Rheged, and one of the last to retreat from Chester before it was overrun by Mercia. He told me where the westward tunnel begins.”

“Hopefully it hasn’t collapsed due to neglect.” Hywel shot a disgusted look at Penda.

“The Romans built it,” Cade said by way of assurance. “While Dafydd leads the riders, we will get everyone else but a skeleton defense through the tunnel as quick as we can. Those who remain behind will make a show of resisting the Northumbrians, and then we ourselves will retreat.” He looked to Rhiann. “I need you to go with Dafydd.”

“You need me on the wall, as always.”

She, as ever, had the power to stop Cade in his tracks just by looking at him. “Rhiann—”

Hywel stepped between them. “She’s right, my lord. Penda says he has archers, but we have over a mile of wall to defend. He doesn’t have that many. If the tunnel is passable, she can retreat with the rest of us.”

“She carries my heir.” Cade spoke through gritted teeth.

Rhiann moved closer. “I will not be used as your mother was—as a thing to barter to whomever the council chooses to replace you. We will live free or not at all. I’m staying with you.”

Cade grimaced. “It will be just like Caer Fawr all over again.”

“You needed me at Caer Fawr.” Rhiann put the flat of her hand on his chest and looked up into his face. “That reminds me. I have thought up a name for our son: Geraint.”

“
Cariad
.” Cade almost folded in on himself, and he found that he was unable to answer. Though, of course, he didn’t have to.

“The archers will defend the north and east walls of the city.” Penda spoke loudly in Saxon, interrupting their quiet conversation in Welsh. “I have thousands of arrows stockpiled.”

Cade kept his eyes on his wife’s face. “That’s good, because it’s likely we’ll need them.”

Chapter Thirteen

Catrin

A
s Taliesin had raised his arms, perhaps to call down some great power to burst the doors asunder—or at least to open them—Catrin had felt a whisper of the same power that she’d felt on the hill when they’d first arrived in the Otherworld. Then it had pulled her towards the castle, and even though they’d decided to come despite their fears, she’d attempted the whole time to block its call. She had every reason to distrust it, particularly after Goronwy had described the aura around the castle—and then the snowstorm. But still, the essence of the castle didn’t feel malevolent to her.

And it seemed silly to not even try the doors before barraging them with magic.

As it turned out, when she pulled on the handle, the door opened easily on greased hinges. Her eyes went first towards the light coming from the middle of the courtyard where a fountain was adorned with trellises of beautiful flowers. A cascade of water spilled from it, and the breeze on her face warmed her from head to toe. Which made the sight of so many men on the ground all around the fountain and in the shadows in the gatehouse barbican all the more horrifying.

Goronwy pressed up behind her, gripping her upper arms, and then he moved her slightly aside so he could pass. He crouched next to the first body, which lay ten feet away, still within the barbican that protected the courtyard, and put two fingers to the man’s neck. The man’s face was gray with death and chiseled, almost as if it were made of stone, so when Goronwy looked back at Catrin and shook his head, she was not surprised.

Taliesin and Mabon moved quickly through the gateway, and at last Catrin followed. Although she remained focused on the dead men and bent to look into every face, Taliesin headed for the front doors to the keep that lay on the far side of the courtyard. Those great doors—nearly as large as the doors to the gatehouse—were closed too, and he pressed an ear to the wood to listen. At some point, Goronwy had unsheathed his sword, and he carried it point down. If the men who’d attacked the castle were still here, their small party was in real danger.

Catrin stood near the fountain with her hand to her throat. “Who could have done this?”

Nobody answered, least of all Taliesin. His silence may have been in large part because he knew and wouldn’t say. Mabon straightened, having actually been feeling for a pulse in another man’s neck, in imitation of Goronwy, and said, “Every one of these men looks nearly the same. Did you notice that, Taliesin?”

“That’s because they’re pawns.”

“As we all are,” Goronwy said.

“No.” Taliesin shook his head. “I mean they are literally pawns. These are the animated forms of the chess set, one of the Treasures, placed here to guard the castle.” He looked around. “This is all of them, it seems.”

“What power!” A mixture of awe and greed crossed Mabon’s face. That he wanted that power for himself went without saying, and Catrin knew in that moment that he would betray all of them without hesitation if it meant he could get closer to the one who wielded it.

Goronwy, however, had moved on to yet another body. “The guards were overwhelmed, either by skill or by numbers.” He motioned with one hand. “Their killers weren’t emotional—just systematic, killing one after another.”

Catrin put aside the ache in her heart and approached Mabon, who had moved to the door to the keep to stand beside Taliesin. “How did you come by the chess piece you gave Rhiann? A king, wasn’t it?”

 Mabon looked mutinous for a moment, but then he laughed. “Why not tell you?” He gestured to the dead pawns. “It was a gift.”

“From whom?”

Mabon waggled his finger at her. “That would be telling now, wouldn’t it?” His expression turned thoughtful. “Perhaps he gave it to me because he had already planned this, knowing that he was going to destroy its magic.”

A strange look crossed Taliesin’s face, as if he didn’t agree but decided at the last moment not to say so. Mabon wasn’t paying attention anyway, having already pushed through the doors to the keep as if he was entering his own hall, rather than one full of ominous magic.

Catrin and Goronwy made to follow, but Taliesin stopped them, though his eyes remained on Mabon. “Don’t believe him,” he said in an undertone.

“It isn’t destroyed?” Goronwy said.

“Whatever has happened here hasn’t destroyed the chess set, only collected its magic into fewer pieces.”

“How do you know?” Catrin said.

“I have the little king with me, and it still thrums with power.”

Mabon, meanwhile, was halfway down the cavernous hall, and he waved a hand indicating they should catch up. “Hurry. I might be mortal, but I am not immune to what has happened here. There are more layers to this castle than what we see here.”

Goronwy held back. “We should leave. We are hopelessly outmatched.”

“There’s no going back,” Taliesin said flatly, and he gestured towards the gatehouse, “only forward.”

Catrin spun around to look where Taliesin pointed. He was right. The gatehouse had disappeared, to be replaced by smooth stone. Even with Catrin’s sight, she couldn’t make out a seam in the wall. “I don’t understand.”

“Time and space don’t move in the Otherworld the way they do in yours,” Mabon said, again sounding more reasonable than Catrin had come to expect from the god. “That was the entrance. Now it isn’t.”

“Stay close,” Taliesin said. “Mabon is right that no doorway leads to the same place twice, and I don’t want to get separated.”

The hall was built in white and gray marble, without colorful tapestries, a fire, or furniture of any kind. The only adornment lay in alcoves along the walls, containing silent gray statues with cold faces not unlike the dead pawns outside.

“Don’t look at them.” Taliesin strode forward after Mabon. “They don’t like it.”

Catrin hustled to keep up. “It’s the rest of the chess set! What happened to them?”

“They are frozen by the same magic that animated the pawns. As the pawns were Dôn’s guards, these are her servants.” Taliesin pointed downward with one finger. “Note the way the stones of the floor emulate a chess board.”

Now that Catrin knew what to look for, she could see the way the white stones alternated with a darker gray. She was more out of her depth than she’d ever been in her life.

“Quiet.” Mabon put out a hand.

They’d reached the far end of the hall, where the only door was a narrow passage off to the right. The wind that whistled past them lifted a stray lock from Catrin’s forehead.

Taliesin looked sharply at the
sidhe
. “What do you hear?”

“I don’t know. Just … something.” Mabon’s expression had turned wary, which was an unusual look for him. “The only way out is up. I’ll go first.” And without waiting for permission, he began to take the stairs two at a time.

“He’s been here before,” Goronwy said. “Let him lead.”

“I’m wondering now if from the beginning this wasn’t a trap for us,” Catrin said. “Arianrhod could have given him to us knowing that Taliesin would take him right back into the Otherworld. Was that the plan from the start? Or did she not know what Taliesin intended?”

“Taliesin didn’t know what he intended, exactly.” The bard said, speaking of himself in the third person. Then he trotted up the stairs after Mabon, soon disappearing as the stairway curved around the central column.

Mabon’s and Taliesin’s long legs easily carried them up the steps. Catrin, however, was a much smaller person—and Goronwy much heavier—so very quickly the two of them fell behind. Catrin was breathing hard by the time they reached the top, having come up at least a hundred steps, which meant that the tower stretched far higher into the sky than she would have thought from looking at it from the outside.

Goronwy pushed open the door at the top of the steps, and they found themselves in a small, round room, perhaps fifteen feet across.

Catrin stopped on the threshold, stunned. “It’s empty. Where are Mabon and Taliesin?”

“Don’t come any closer.” Taliesin’s voice echoed around them. It held the tone of Command and stopped them in their tracks, but there was no sign of the bard himself.

“I knew I should have gone my own way.” Mabon’s voice faded into silence, and Catrin realized Taliesin had been speaking to him, not to her and Goronwy.